Notion MCP Server vs Obsidian MCP

When to pick Notion MCP Server

• Your project documentation lives in Notion, and you want an agent to find it and read pages as Markdown. The hosted service supports semantic search across the workspace and connected apps, useful when your task spans more than one page.
• You want to turn development work into workspace documentation. Use notion-create-pages to create pages and notion-update-page to revise existing material, keeping the result alongside the documents your team already uses.
• Your task involves structured workspace content or discussion. notion-query-data-sources, notion-get-comments and notion-create-comment cover queries and page comments, rather than treating every operation as a file edit.
• You want access to follow each user's existing Notion permissions. The hosted service uses OAuth and requires no local server, integration token or manual page sharing for that connection.

When to pick Obsidian MCP

• Your architecture notes or meeting records live in an Obsidian vault. Use list_files_in_vault to inspect its contents, search to find text across files and get_file_contents to read a selected note.
• You need to insert material at a specific location inside a note. patch_content targets a heading, block reference or frontmatter field, giving the agent a concrete insertion point in an existing document.
• You want an agent to collect findings in a vault file. append_content can add text to a new or existing file, including a separate note containing a meeting summary.
• You need file and directory operations as part of maintaining your notes. The documented tools include directory listing and delete_file, which can remove a file or directory. Choose it when those operations match the work you intend to delegate.

Main differences

• Notion's hosted service connects over HTTP. Obsidian MCP runs as a Python process and communicates with the MCP client over stdio; it reaches the vault through the separately running Local REST API community plugin.
• Notion's hosted authentication uses OAuth and existing user permissions. Obsidian MCP takes the plugin's API key through OBSIDIAN_API_KEY, with host and port settings identifying the plugin endpoint.
• Notion's tools operate on workspace pages, data sources, comments and users. Obsidian's tools operate on vault files and directories, including targeted insertion, appending and deletion. Pick according to the objects your task needs to change.
• Remote Notion MCP provides semantic search across Notion and connected apps. Obsidian's documented search tool matches a text query across vault files. These support different ways of finding context for an agent.
• Notion's README distinguishes its hosted service from a separate self-hosted implementation that is no longer actively maintained or supported. Its local token configuration and manual page-sharing instructions belong to that implementation. Obsidian's documented setup instead requires a local server process and the REST API plugin.

Setup

For Notion, add the hosted endpoint in Claude Code with claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcp, then authorize through OAuth. This connects to the hosted service described above.

For Obsidian, install and enable the Local REST API community plugin and copy its API key. Configure your MCP client to launch uvx mcp-obsidian with OBSIDIAN_API_KEY. Set OBSIDIAN_HOST and OBSIDIAN_PORT if needed; their defaults are 127.0.0.1 and 27124. The documented Python requirement is Python 3.11 or later.